The problem of dealing with waste water is especially acute in the oil and gas industry. Drilling and completing oil and gas wells requires injecting fluid materials including thousands of barrels of water. A fracking operation requires injecting frack fluids which may include hundreds of thousands of barrels of water. Workover operations often require injecting hundreds of barrels of kill fluids, which are primarily made up of water. Much of the injected water from drilling, completion, workover and fracking operations is later recovered as flowback water at the wellhead, creating a large scale waste water disposal problem.
Additionally, once a well is in a production mode, much of the produced volume from the well is typically in the form of salt water which must be separated out and trucked away for treatment or disposal.
As water trucks going to and from the well site can only carry approximately a hundred barrels of water, it will be appreciated from the forgoing that drilling and operating an oil well requires hundreds of truck trips to haul the water. Additionally, water brought to the site has to be paid for, and treatment or disposal fees have to be paid for water hauled away from the site. Costs go up as the trucking distances for the water increase.
A device compact enough to be located near the wellhead for cleaning flowback and produced water adequately to permit its further use would be very desirable, as it would greatly reduce the amount of water that would have to be otherwise trucked in and out, and/or the costs associated with acquiring, transporting, treating or disposing of the water.
It is an object of this invention to provide such a device.